Technology

Sure. The majority of the BitWarden client is licensed under the GPL, which categorizes it as “free software”. However, one of the dependencies titled “BitWarden-SDK” was licensed under a different proprietary license which didn’t allow re-distribution of the SDK. For the most part, this was never a problem as FOSS package maintainers didn’t include the dependency (as it was optional) and were able to compile the various clients and keep the freedoms granted by the GPL license. However, a recent change made BitWarden-SDK a required dependency, which violated freedom 0 (the freedom to distribute the code as you please). BitWarden CTO came out and said this was an error and fixed this, making BitWarden SDK an optional dependency once again which now makes BitWarden free software again. For the average joe, this wouldn’t have mattered as BitWarden SDK contains features that are usually favored by businesses and the average Joe can live without. So everything now returns back to normal, hopefully.

That's a poor understanding of the situation. Nothing in the licensing changed. The SDK has always been the proprietary business to business secrets management product. The client integrates with and can use that SDK to provide the paid service to businesses. The client and the server side management of password has always been and still is FOSS.

This was apparently an accidental change in the build code (not the client code, just the building scripts) that required the inclusion of the SDK to build the client when actually it has never and doesn't really need any of that code. It prevented building the client without accepting the SDK license. Which it shouldn't.

This was fixed and some things will be put in place so it doesn't happen again. Nothing in the licensing scheme changed, at all. This is not a catastrophic enshittification event. A Dev was just being lazy and forgot to check the dependencies on the build chain before their commit.

You can do what you like, but the change is sane, and they've now separated their Secrets Manager, which is their proprietary software for businesses, from their primary client, which is GPL.

IMO, the internet is doing that thing again where they invent villains.

“I only read the headline and the comments from the threads a week ago, I am truly disappointed in Bitwarden’s stance against FOSS as I’ve misunderstood it.”

vaultwarden

Something tells me you're the kind of person who sees a car turn the same direction as you twice and starts freaking out that you're being followed...

Because most people need a cloud solution for synchronization across devices. Unless you’re spinning up your own service like Nextcloud or similar for this, relying on a commercial cloud storage service for storing the file is just as dangerous (perhaps more so, as your attack surface is now across two third party services) as relying on someone like Bitwarden or Lastpass.

Bitwarden can be fully self hosted, I'm doing it. My Bitwarden server doesn't (and can't) talk to them at all as it has no way to access the internet. They know nothing about my deployment except that I signed up for a free license key.

Are you a software developer ? Because you are way out of touch with what users want.

Well, who did you trust to build your hardware?

I used to use Keepass and sync thing and would consistently run into conflicts between my desktop and mobile entries. Maybe there's a better way to do it that I'm missing, but that was very annoying

cuz being able to log in is handy sometimes